Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the biggest beta of them all? No, not Destiny – 4.6 million participants doesn’t even come close. No, it’s not The Division, although 6.4 million is getting closer.

The winner, my friend, is Overwatch, with a massive 9.7 million people taking part.

They didn’t all play Tracer.

Sure, it’s not an entirely fair comparison – the betas ran for different lengths of time (and Destiny was on different platforms) – but it’s an impressive achievement nonetheless.

From a practical perspective, this means Blizzard has had plenty of opportunities to thoroughly test its newest project. Gamers played more than 4.9 billion minutes of Overwatch, across 37 million matches. If one person did all that one after the other, it would take 3.3 million days. How many years is that? Over 9,000! (Sorry.)

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime is, predictably, “thrilled” that so many players took part in the open beta.

Our mission was to make sure as many console and PC gamers as possible could experience the full game ahead of its launch – the response was overwhelming, and we hope that everyone had a blast.

Overwatch launches for Windows PC, PS4 and Xbox One on May 24. You can check out Adelaide’s console version Quick Look, if you want to know more.